Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged that the Biden administration pressured Facebook to censor content, including critical COVID-19 information and reports on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
In a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Zuckerberg revealed that senior Biden administration officials pressured Meta to remove content related to the coronavirus pandemic in 2021.
“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” Zuckerberg wrote.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg continued. “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”
Zuckerberg explained that Meta is committed to resisting similar pressure in the future, stating, “We should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”
In addition to the COVID-19 content, Zuckerberg admitted that Meta made a mistake in suppressing The New York Post’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election.
The FBI had warned Meta about a possible Russian disinformation operation related to the Biden family, leading the platform to temporarily limit the story’s reach while awaiting fact-checking results.
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” Zuckerberg acknowledged.
He assured Rep. Jordan that Meta has since revised its policies to prevent similar incidents, such as no longer temporarily demoting content in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers.
The admission comes as part of a broader investigation by the House Judiciary Committee into whether the executive branch improperly influenced private companies to censor certain types of speech.
Zuckerberg’s letter reflects a stronger acknowledgment of the mistakes made by Meta compared to his earlier comments on the issue.
Meta has provided the committee with thousands of documents and made several employees available for interviews as part of the investigation.
This acknowledgment by Zuckerberg is likely to fuel further debate about the extent to which government influence may have affected the information available to the public during the 2020 election.